Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
Network Management

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### Network Management

Network management refers to a network engineer's ability to manipulate his resources from a central location, using the network itself as a communication and configuration medium.

#### Network Host Management

On one extreme of the network host management scale is your basic MS-DOS PC, with virtually no knowledge of the network. Windows, and its newer derivatives in particular, recognize the network as an integral part of the software platform, and permit centralized control of users, directory permissions, and the like. A step beyond this is a typical UNIX-based X-Windows workstation, which provides similar permission-based access control, and allows a program running on a remote system to display a window on the screen and manipulate its contents. The desktop becomes a network terminal. Many of a UNIX system's shortcomings are made up by its ease in executing remote commands.

#### Network Initialization - RARP and BootP

An area of host management that deserves special mention is network initialization. Several schemes have been designed for basic IP configuration, permitting hosts to locate their IP addresses, subnet masks, and DNS servers without having this information pre-configured. Reverse ARP (RARP), documented in RFC 903, is a simple, IEEE 802-specific method to assign IP addresses based on Ethernet addresses. The bootstrap protocol (BootP), documented in RFC 951, is similar, but uses UDP. The best way to initialize most dial-up serial connections is currently the PPP Protocol.

#### Network Router Management

In the world of routers, network management is based on the concept of a Management Information Base (MIB), a database of manageable items. In a typical MIB, you will find the system name, IP routing tables, and counts of the packets handled by each protocol. The most popular protocol in use to manipulate MIBs is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). A second version of SNMP has been developed, with better security, for one thing. SNMPv2 is part of the lofty-sounding Internet-Standard Network Management Framework Version 2, and is accompanied by nearly a dozen attending documents. RFC 1441 introduces the entire "framework".

`\begin{soapbox}`

The MIB model seems to be quite powerful, SNMP is a quality protocol, and dozens of MIBs have been written for all kinds of network devices. Few have been implemented, though, simply because few people can really use any of them. The lack of cheap, good quality user interfaces has seriously hampered the acceptance of SNMP. A complete network management system has to make `chmod` available to the user, as well as `/etc/rc` to the engineer. SNMP gives us `/etc/rc`, but nothing for the user. SNMP is invisible to the average user, and will never gain its full potential until simple, easy interfaces are made available to the masses. The Internet business community seems to have decided that SNMP is for engineers, and engineers have money, and the rest of us don't use SNMP.

`\end{soapbox}`

- Management Information Base (MIB)
- SNMP Protocol Overview

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
Network Management